Facebook has surveyed its customers and claims that users say they want more messages from friends and fewer offers from a business. Customers are checking their news feed many times a day, 15 times on average, so we want to be seen.

Facebook owns Instagram, so these rules will be applied to both platforms during 2017

So, how do we get our content to be shared? We need to be relevant and interesting. That means that posts need a response from users. Likes comments and shares will improve the relevance to your target audience. This applies to your free posts, but will also have an effect for your paid posts.

This means that you will want to target your audience for a specific niche, even within your followers. This will then increase the relevance and improve the score for Facebook

60% of consumers will check your business Facebook page first.

80% are more included to purchase if they find you credible on Facebook

62% of consumers say Facebook is the most important and use the channel for small business to connect on social media.

Create content that is motivation, inspirational, hot, because these are more likely to be shared on to others. This increases your post reach and relevance and keeps the audience happy.

Don’t boost posts.

Most small businesses have been spending $2-$5 a day to boost posts. These are not targetted posts, they just hit anybody online at the time.

Is Facebook still worth it?

62% of consumers use Facebook

12% of consumers use Pinterest

11% of consumers use Twitter

9% of consumers use Instagram

Remember that these are averages and your business could easily have different results.

Who is your avatar

You need to define your ideal customer. Without knowing who this is, you can never craft a target audience to advertise on Facebook.

Create lookalike audiences

One way to profile new customers is to take an email list of your existing customers and upload this to Facebook. Facebook will try and match these email addresses with Facebook users and will then look at around 50 different things Facebook knows about them. From this, it will then be able to create a look-a-like audience of new potential customers. This is more specific and targetted than you could ever design yourself.

If you run an ad campaign which brings in great results, you can use this list to create a look-a-like audience too.

Whats ads do best?

Emotion – Create an emotional response.

Motion = Make your content move, jump out of the screen

Colours – Choose colours that work with the Facebook platform, but that sick out. Any ad needs to be congruent with your own website and company colour scheme. Don’t make big changes of colour, or message between your ads and landing/capture pages.

This is a great place to do A/B or split testing. Try two ads and then keep with the best. Then make a slight change and split test this with the existing. Rinse and repeat.

Where should Paid posts land?

Better to link to your website than some landing page company. Where they land setup all the pixel tracking for Facebook and Google, even if you don’t run Google ads yet. Make sure you have your Google Analytics set up and hopefully with an analytics goal set, so you can see progress through the funnel. The customer now has YOUR website in the browser history. You have more hits to impressed google search.

Don’t make it the first time

People will often not always buy the first time, so use retargeting and email marketing to give an added push.

Escape the Facebook loop

Your Facebook account could be shut down, you don’t have direct contact, less than 2% see a post and you have to pay to reach the rest, so you want to capture the email address or phone number of contacts for a direct relationship.

Facebook marketing is creating a relationship.

You need to nurture the contact so that when they come to the site to purchase, they are ready to do so without hesitation.

How does this work with WordPress?

make sure your content can be easily liked and shared

You can use your website for landing pages. This is better than 3rd party sites because people can see you have a full interesting website and not just a sales page.

Is this an automated system?

Don’t believe anybody who claims it is a set and forget it system making money on autopilot! You want to be looking at the responses and tweaking all the time to improve your results. The best thing is you can do this at your own speed and on your own terms. However, the more effort you put in, the better your results can become.